Zack Exley: The New Right's Secret Sauce

Zack Exley: The New Right's Secret Sauce
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Today, the worldview of post-war Liberalism is gone. It's not coming back: It can't solve America's problems, and Americans can feel that in their gut. Post-war Liberalism was the idea that the American economy was on a roll and we just needed to steer it in the right direction with smart regulations, incentives, and investments in Research and Development, and Infrastructure (R&D&I).

That doesn't ring true anymore. People know that our economy has been decaying for decades. They know it is sliding in the direction of more decay faster than ever. They know that the bubbles of the 90s and the 00s only covered over the decay. They know the stimulus and bailouts -- in the way they were structured -- are final desperate measures to keep the decay covered for another few minutes.

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Even a bigger plan -- which almost no one is talking about now -- to invest trillions in R&D&I, going far beyond energy, is a purely positive idea. But that still leaves Americans wondering where our new competitive industries will come from. They know instinctively what economic historians know academically: that any smart industrialist will build his or her factories in China or Mexico before the United States as long as American workers' standard of living is many times richer than it is in those and other countries.
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In opposition to vague and muddled R&D&I schemes, the New Right's worldview gives people an ideal to fight for: individual entrepreneurship -- and a cause to fight against: anything that's not individual entrepreneurship.

The New Right worldview says:

Don't waste our money on incentives and R&D&I investments, I don't trust you (politicians) to spend it wisely. I think you're just going to waste my money on earmarks that won't amount to a better economy or society. You can talk about green jobs, but I think you're going to blow this money on pet projects or poorly run projects. I think it would be smarter if you let people keep their money and let them get America back on track in their crowd sourced/ free market way: we'll start new businesses, invent new things, etc... If you look at American history, it's that kind of decentralized action that has always moved us forward, and the big collective efforts have been footnotes.

That rings pretty true to a lot of Americans. It rings true to a lot of Democrats and Progressives. But the important thing is this: It inspires millions of Americans -- not a majority, but a significant and vocal chunk. Meanwhile, there is no alternative story that inspires.

Parts of the New Right's story is true, but as a whole, it is wrong. It holds together only if you accept all of its presuppositions, but most of those presuppositions are inaccurate. No economy in the history of the world has ever revitalized itself purely through decentralized, spontaneous action by disconnected individuals. That kind of action is half the story. But without the other half -- forethought and limited but important collective undertakings -- economies do not transform, they stagnate.

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What happened next was that Europe and East Asia succeeded in transforming their economies (mostly using that common sense mixture of entrepreneurism and planning) into powerhouses that gave the U.S. a run for our money. At first, their great transformations created jobs for Americans, as we supplied the steel, the machines and the know how. But soon, their cheap, quality goods put many Americans out of work. For the past 30 years we have kept unemployment relatively low and incomes relatively high by blowing financial bubbles and borrowing money unsustainably from abroad. Also, real wages have been falling the whole time -- precipitously for the bottom ....half of U.S. income earners.

America finds itself in a position now where we need a massive transformation of our economy. But we find ourselves without access to any worldview that can imagine it. Reconstructing such a worldview is the great task of our age. We have to be careful to do it with full awareness of the very real threats from Socialism and Fascism. Especially if America's economic crisis deepens into a depression, both of those paradigms will become tempting to many once again. ...